The little feudal castle built on Roman substructures was wrecked by the Saracen corsairs in the thirteenth century. The present village of Napoule is tenanted by poor fishermen, but it is likely to look up as a bathing place, and as a centre for excursions into the Estérel. The tower is all that remains of a castle of the Counts of Villeneuve. The rocks in the bay, beaten by the sea, have assumed fantastic shapes; being of sandstone, they are not like porphyry, too hard to resist the erosion of the sea. And La Napoule, facing east, sees how that,— “The eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.” _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, III. 2. Another old place that fell into decay, but which has in it now hopes of renovation, is Antibes. This was the Greek Antipolis, the town _over against_ Nicæa, at the farther side of the bay. Almost all of the monuments bearing Greek inscriptions that have been found in such numbers in Provence belong to a date after the Roman annexation. But this is not the case with regard to a curious inscription discovered at Antibes on a black boulder, egg-shaped, of diorite, a kind of basalt. This stone had no shaping given to it by the hand of man, but on it was cut in archaic characters, this inscription:— “I am Terpon, servant of the august goddess Aphrodite; may Cypris reward with her favours those who erected me here.” What does this mean? How could the stone be Terpon, a servant of the Goddess of Love? It would seem to have been one of those mysterious sacred stones which received worship from the most remote ages, a form of worship belonging to the earliest people of whom anything is known. This _cult_ of rude unshapen stones, very generally black, prevailed among the Phœnicians; it forced its way into the worship of the Israelites. Such stones were set up even in the temple of Jehovah by some of the kings, who inclined to the superstitions of the Canaanites. The worship had so strong a hold on the Arabs that Mohammed could not extirpate it, and the Black Stone of Mecca still receives the veneration of the faithful. It forced its way into the religion of the ancient Greeks, and though quite incongruous with their mythology, held its own to the last. Prudentius, the Christian poet (died about 410) shows us how strong was the devotion, even in his day. “His first food was the sacred meal, his earliest sight the sacred candles, and the family gods growing black with holy oil. He saw his mother pale at her prayers before the holy stone, and he, too, would be lifted by his nurse to kiss it in his turn.” (_Cont. Symmachum._) It has been so tough that it is not extirpated yet. In 1877 a correspondent of the Society of Anthropology at Paris wrote about the worship as still prevailing in the valleys of the Pyrenees.